Rada's personal impact course helps hairdressers speak out on stage

The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art has partnered with L’Oréal Professionnel to deliver a Personal Impact course, which helps prepare hairdressers for public presentations. RADA in Business tutor, Sandra Miller, speaks to HJ about the course and offers some key hints and tips. Tell us a little bit more about the course you run in conjunction with L’Oréal Professionnel? This course is similar to our Personal Impact course, which is open to anyone, but we run a version exclusively for L’Oréal hairdressers who often present work to large audiences. We teach people to be aware that it’s not just your voice that communicates – body language is also incredibly important. There’s absolutely no written work on the course, because the whole point is to get people to use their physicality. How could the course benefit those working in a salon environment? On the salon floor you’re performing in other people’s personal space so you have to respect that. Our course teaches professionals to listen to their customers, and not just their voice. In a salon environment, you’re working with so many types of people all the time, and one of the aims of this course is to make you adaptable, through your verbal language, your body language, your whole manner. A good hairdresser will recognise the emotional states the client is in and react to them – reassure clients when they can’t see whether the cut will work, for example. Are there any definite dos and don’ts when it comes to presenting to a crowd? When public speaking, hairdressers often use a demonstration model, so prior to the event they should do a technical rehearsal, making sure they can be seen by everyone in the audience, even when they’re working on a model, and checking the microphone for example. Do you have any advice on how to control nerves before and during presentations? Nerves exist to tell us that something is important. You can’t stop them but you can control it by breathing well. Proper deep breaths in and out, and really anchoring your feet on the ground can make a difference to nerves. If you have an attack of nerves, just stop and breathe. Any pause that you take may seem long to you, but the audience won’t notice. Are there any exercises/techniques hairdressers could use between public speaking engagements to help them deliver on the day? If you have done anything like yoga, tai-chi or pilates, the breathing exercises are extremely useful because they make you aware of your body as an instrument. We’ve talked about breathing and being aware of your breath as one of the most important things for confident communication, so anything which can help you do this will be beneficial. Golden Rules of Public Speaking • Less is more! Think about how you can use just a few words and surround them with enough pause for the words to sink in. • Avoid too much professional jargon, use personal experiences and stories instead. People really perk up when you say "remember when…" Anecdotes are more powerful. • You should prepare for public speaking as much as possible – and that means rehearsal. We suggest actually learning what you have to say, but then present it as if you haven’t. This is what actors do, which makes performances more confident because the words are second nature. Once you’re learned the words, you can focus less on what you’re saying, and more on how you are delivering it.